Ssoo/or in* 3 HI. 




OR A T I O N 



DKLIVEKED BEFORE THE 



^ITY COUNCIL AND CITIZENS 



OF BOSTON, 



JULY 4, 1867, 



REV. GEORGE H. HEPWORTH. 




BOSTON: 
ALFRED MUDGE & SON, CITY PRINTERS, 34 SCHOOL STREET. 

18 6 7. 




Class__E_:Ll^__ 

Book ^Z4-_ 

1 8^7 



ORATION 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



CITY COUNCIL AND CITIZENS 



OF BOSTON, 



JULY 4, 186 7, 



REV. GEORGE H. HEPWORTH. 




BOSTON: 
ALFRED MUDGE & SON, CITY PRINTERS, 34 SCHOOL STREET 

1867. 



r 



JIM n i9oy 






-r^ 



CITY OF BOSTON 



In Board of Aldermen, July 8, 1867. 

Oedered : That the thanks of the City Council be presented 
to the Reverend George H. Hep worth for the eloquent and 
patriotic oration delivered by him before the City Government 
and the citizens of Boston on the ninety-first anniversary of the 
Declaration of American Independence ; and that he be request- 
ed to furnish a copy for publication. ' 

Passed — sent down for concurrence. 

CHAS. W. SLACK, Chairman. 



Concurred. 



Approved. 



In Common Council, ,ln\y 11, 1867. 
WESTON LEWIS, Fresident. 

OTIS NORCROSS, Mmjor. 



ORATION. 



Mr. Mayoi\ Gentlemen of the City Council^ Friends 
and Fellow- Citizens: 

The progress towards an ideal society and an 
ideal government which marks each new page of 
history gives the largest encouragement to the 
reformers of every age. We are moving so rapidly 
that the wildest dreams of the fanatic of to-day 
will become the commonplace realities of to-morrow, 
while the conservatism of to-day embodies all the 
ideas which the most hopeful theorist uttered yes- 
terday. Each generation, bearing the world in its 
giant arms, toils bravely up the mountain side 
until it is worn and weary, then lifts its precious 
burden to the shoulders of the young and fresh 
generation that succeeds, and lies down to sleep. 
With every age the burden grows heavier and more 
precious, as mankind are freighted with larger 
responsibilities, with new philanthropies, and with 
higher duties, and with every age the strength to 



b JULY 4, 18G7. 

bear it grows greater as men become more wise, 
more manly and more Christian. So, by slow 
degrees, we are ascending from successive slaveries 
to successive freedoms. 

As the geographer, standing on the hither side 
of the Rocky Mountains, where the stream comes 
gurgling from the hidden reservoir, can watch that 
slender thread of limpid light as it finds its way 
through forest and plain, broadened and deepened 
ever and anon by kindred streams, until at last 
made omnipotent by the grand Missouri and the 
grander Ohio, it pours itself a resistless flood 
through the centre of a continent, — so, I take it, 
the historian standing on the hither side of the 
rocky summits of barbarism, and seeing the crude 
thought that is to shape itself into law, and control 
society, can watch that slender thread as it finds its 
way from age to age, increased here by the vic- 
tories of war and there by the higher victories of 
peace, until at last, deepened and broadened into 
omnipotence by the Missouri of Revolution and the 
Ohio of Revelation, it pours itself through our cen- 
tury, bearing on its bosom the world's hopes after 
the higher law, and the thousand educational move- 
ments by which that law is to be reached. 

And, gentlemen, it is at once cheering and 



ORATION. I 

instructive to note the various stages of this great 
progressive movement. It increases our faith in 
man, and adds inspiration to every new reformatory 
movement, to watch the nations of the earth strug- 
gling through the darkness of barbarism, feudahsm 
and every kind of oppression, led by the divine 
instinct which searches for the light of a larger 
liberty. It gives us a new strength for to-day's 
drudgery and toil to watch the gradual refinement 
of society, the constant sloughing off of old and 
useless customs, and the constant putting on of 
new usages which better fit the growing people. 

The French were only children playing with the 
toys of national childhood, until Charlemagne taught 
them to put off the garments of barbarism, and to 
put on the robes and manners of civilized man. 
They did not grow to conscious national maturity 
until they were baptized in the blood of the Revo- 
lution of '93, and they will not achieve their 
manifest destiny until in another revolution they shall 
cast off the imperial burden that is held up by the 
points of half a million bayonets and learn to gov- 
ern themselves. The English were little better 
than slaves until they won their freedom on the 
plain of Runnymede, and they did not grow to 
manhood until they had beheaded Charles I., and 



8 



JULY 4, 1867, 



proclaimed that no Stuart and no tyrant should ever 
make laws for a free people. That grand impulse 
which has driven them thus far will not let them 
rest until they strip the lawn from the Bishops in 
the House of Lords, and the particolored riband 
from the so-called nobility, and proclaim aloud that 
he alone is peasant who has a peasant's heart, and 
he alone is noble who has a princely soul. 

America began its great work of reform in 
the seventeenth century. The dreams of the seers 
of ages began to crystallize themselves into realities 
when the keel of the Mayflower grated on the bar 
of Plymouth Harbor. The Colonists entered the 
high school of the new politics when the tocsin 
of war called them to the support of a govern- 
ment of men by men, and they graduated into the 
true manhood of the race when they planted their 
victorious banner on the top of Lookout Mountain, 
and proclaimed Liberty throughout all the land. 

We have come to believe that this whole coun- 
try is consecrated to the republican experiment. 
The magnificent valley between the Rocky Moun- 
tains and the Alleghanies is the crucible in which 
history will test the political possibilities of the 
race. Untrammelled by any of the traditions or 
usages of the old world, with no time-honored and 



ORATION. y 

time-hardened social prejudices to overcome, with 
no longing after the pageantry of royalty, we feel 
ourselves to be a people wholly free, and standing 
on the very threshold of a work too large to 
measure, and almost too appalling to contemplate. 
The blood in the veins of every European nation- 
ality runs sluggishly and timidly. Thrones have no 
stability ; tyrants no power. The people have well- 
nigh outgrown their worm-eaten tradition that kings 
are ordained of God, and he who wields the sceptre 
with the arrogance of earlier times does it at the 
peril of his life. The continent that once held the 
person of royalty sacred now simply endures a king 
who knows that he not only governs but is in his 
turn governed. The blood in the veins of America, 
on the other hand, leaps through the ruddy channel 
of life with all the force and promise of youth. We 
believe that we have a special mission ; that the 
whole country is ours from the warm gulf to the 
frigid zone, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific ; 
and that here, fired with simple faith in educated 
men, we shall be able, without the aid of royal favor, 
to make our own laws, watch over our own interests, 
and write our own history. If the Old World inter- 
feres, either by that strange neutrality which refuses 
help to the loyal while it supplies arms to the 



10 JULY 4, 1867. 

disloyal, or by sending a wretched debauchee to 
turn our flank in Mexico, we have but one word of 
warning, — Hands off; America is neither forgetful of 
her friends nor afraid of her foes. 

By slow degrees our geographical limits are widen- 
ing. Within a few years we have put our seal upon 
the golden mountains of California and the rich plains 
of Texas. Lately the magnificent territory of the 
extreme northwest has been bought. It cannot be 
many years before that people who have resisted 
tyranny with wonderful bravery, who have at last 
hedged in within a wall of sharp bayonets the usurper 
and the adventurer, will knock loud for entrance into 
the Home of the Free. It cannot be long before 
we shall have that narrow belt of land that lies on 
the banks of the St. Lawrence and the shore of the 
lakes. For two generations it has been the asylum 
of the heroic black man who refused to bear the 
stripes of the overseer, and the black woman who 
denied her body to the lust of her master ; and now, 
by the wonderful progress of events, it offers itself a 
hospital to the sick at heart, those arrogant heroes 
whose " dreams have faded all at length," and wlio 
find the air of free America too bracing for the slender 
life that remains after the fruitless struggle. Then, with 
the whole continent our own, we can march through the 



ORATION. 11 

ages, keeping step to the music of Justice, Morality, 
and Political Righteousness. Gentlemen, few nations 
have such heavy, glorious responsibilities as we. Re- 
publicanism is but just begun. It is a temple whose 
arching roof will sometime in the future offer its shelter 
and protection to the people of every clime. To-day, 
the poor of Europe may live content within the thatched 
cottage in political oblivion, while the favored and the 
wealthy sit beneath the gilded roof of power and shape 
laws to suit their tastes or caprices ; but the hour shall 
yet come, how far off in the distance it may be none 
can tell, when the great heart and strong arm of the 
people of every nationality shall decree that there shall 
be no king to live in a palace, and no citizen so lowly 
that he can have no voice in making the laws that 
govern him, but when all the people shall come 
together beneath the same roof to be ruled each by 
the whole and the whole by each. 

Standing, then, as we do, at the beginning of a 
new era, looking forward with large hope to a 
peaceful and glorious future, it is well for us to 
come together on this mighty anniversary to measure 
our strength and confess our weakness. We ac- 
knowledge with due gratitude the constant and 
especial presence of that Providence which has led 
us along the weary road, guiding us in the day- 



12 JULY4,1867. 

time by the pillar of cloud that rose from the 
battle-field, and in the night season by the pillar 
of flame that formed the bivouac-fires of the army 
of the Republic. We should be unworthy citizens 
if we failed to recognize the hidden Hand that has 
guarded us, or forgot to speak of it in the midst 
of our universal festivities. 

The particular elements of our nationality to which 
I desire to call your special attention are, first, the 
Southern Element, its nature, and its probable influ- 
ence on the future. 

The South has never been a help to the cause 
of Republicanism. The one incendiary element in 
our government, the element of caste, it has stood 
in bold contrast to that levelling and democratic 
influence which has been the boast and pride of 
the North. With a territory almost unparalleled 
for richness of soil ; with long mountain ranges 
containing in large abundance every mineral which 
adds to the wealth or strength of society ; with a 
climate favorable to the finest specimens of physical 
and moral manhood ; with broad rivers that run 
through every valley of the region ; with noble 
forests to supply every domestic and commercial 
need ; with agricultural possibilities that would rouse 
the ambition of almost any people, — with all this 



ORATION. 13 

in its favor, we are compelled to admit that the 
whole region is to-day practically unknown and 
undeveloped. The granite hills and sterile soil of 
New England, where niggardly nature gives only 
what she must, developed by the strong arm and 
active brain of freedom, have done more for the 
cause of civilization, more for the commercial wel- 
fare of the world, than all that vast territorv that 
might have shaped the destinies, and controlled the 
government of the country. When, in the course 
of a few years, the political storm shall have sub- 
sided, and we come to explore and count the value 
of this region, we shall tind a new argument against 
slavery, and a new cause for gratitude that we 
possess so rich a domain. The wealth that lies 
hidden in the rocky caverns of the Alleghanies and 
in the fastnesses of the Cumberland range, calling 
on the thrift and enterprise of the new generation 
of young men, is beyond all calculation. Carry to 
the South, and awaken in the South, the same 
foresight, energy, genius and inventive power that 
have subdued the soil of the North, and before 
those who are now in middle life shall have gone 
to their rest, we shall find that one of the richest 
and best parts of America lies between the Ohio 
and the Gulf. 



14 JULY 4, 18G7. ' 

But to-day we have more interest in the poHtical 
aspect of that region. Everywhere is chaos, social 
anarchy, while oiu* ears are every moment greeted 
with the roar of some brigand mob, or the cry 
of some half-murdered man or outraged woman. How 
much of this is the inevitable consequence of a 
great war I cannot say ; how much might be 
avoided if the victors had only a fixed and deter- 
mined policy, and an executive that dared to stand 
on the true republican idea and speak with the 
consciousness of having twenty millions of freemen 
behind him, I am unable to determine. This, how- 
ever, I know ; that mobs and murders are the rag- 
ged, blood-bedi*aggled fringes of the crimson garment 
of war. It is scarcely to be hoped that the tem- 
pest-tossed ocean will calm in a moment, or that 
the frenzy of the crushed and defeated will in a 
single hour calm itself into the propriety of the 
good citizen. If the North will only be true, there 
is nothing to fear. If we will not rush at once 
with only the greed for gain, into the selfishness 
of accumulation, forgetful and careless of the high 
political concerns of the country, the work of re- 
construction, now so perplexing, will be as easy as 
the work of the sculptor who shapes the plastic 
clay. Too long already have we delayed. We 



ORATION. 15 

have lost headway by the " backing and filling " 
of our mere politicians. We have scarcely known 
what to do, or, if we have caught a glimpse of 
duty now and then, we have not had the moral 
courage to perform it. 

If I know anything about the Southern people 
I know that all that is needed to insure perfect 
success in the great work before us is that we 
shall first know what to do and then proceed to 
do it. We have harmed our cause and stayed 
our progress more than can be told, by the exceed- 
ing unsteadiness of our political policy. To lift 
the flag for a while with loud huzzas, as though we 
intended to be exceedingly severe, and then to drop 
it out of regard to the feelings of the foe, is only 
to exhibit a weakness which costs us our self- 
respect, while it adds a battalion to the corps of 
the enemy. Nail the flag of your policy to the 
mast-head, and reconstruction will be easy. 

There is in the South, to-day, a large party 
that will gladly co-operate with us. It is com- 
posed of that middle class that never had any 
heart in the war, that has reaped from it only 
financial ruin. These people hate the large land- 
owners as the small trader always hates the monop- 
olist. For years they have seen that the cause 



16 



JULY 4, 1867. 



of secession was not their cause ; that they had no 
other interest in it than that sad interest which 
the serf has in the victory of his lord ; that the fight 
could only end in a continuance of servitude for them- 
selves and their families. These are the men who 
congregate in the great centres to listen so eagerly to 
the words of orators from the North. A new life 
is opening to them. The gyves have dropped from 
their wrists, and they are for the first time catch- 
ing a glimpse of republican America. They will 
form the grand Southern political party of the fu- 
ture. They are in the vanguard of the great army 
of reconstruction, and have bivouacked on their lit- 
tle farms, waiting to receive orders from headquar- 
ters where to march. 

The politicians and the so-called aristocrats of the 
South, — those who were foremost in the councils 
of secession, — who were willing to risk their all 
for the re-establishment of slavery, deserve no pity 
from us. They risked and lost ; let them suffer 
the full consequences of their guilt. With the poor, 
rebellion was a delusion ; and a magnanimous victor 
can afford to forgive the deluded, if their delu- 
sion has been dispelled. With the educated and 
wealthy, secession was a crime, and we are not 
magnanimous, but weak and pusillanimous, if we 



ORATION 



17 



disregard it. By connecting no punishment with 
open disloyalty, we put a premium on political 
ambition for the future. Fifty years hence, when 
another dissension shall shake this country to its 
centre, when the reverberations of another civil war 
shall rouse the people to arms, bad men will look 
back to this hour when they reckon the probable 
cost of their venture. If they see that the people 
have attached the highest penalty to any assault 
upon the Government, they will hesitate long before 
they commit themselves to the uncertainties of a 
rebellion. But if, on looking back, they hear no 
word of warning from such times as these ; if on 
reading the annals of America from '60 to '67, 
they find no record of any punishment whatever 
that stamps the adventurer with infamy ; if they 
see that confiscated estates are all returned with a 
half apology on the part of the Government for 
having taken them at all ; that a pardon is ob- 
tained for the asking ; that the heroes of the 
rebellion are feted by the people ; that the very 
leader, when brought into Court, is set at liberty 
on a petty bail, and that even that is supplied by 
a chief of the party that conducted the war, and 
that there can be no surer or safer or nearer road 
to preferment than that which leads through a 

3 



18 JULY 4, 1867, 

rebellion, think you they will hesitate long before 
committing themselves to a cause which, if it fails 
utterly, leads to no disastrous consequences, and 
which, regarded only as a speculation, offers a 
thousand inducements to the daring? I tell you 
nay. 

I cannot help feeling that one of the prominent 
weaknesses of a Republic is its forgetfulness of 
great offences and of great offenders. The minis- 
ters of justice track the criminal who has lifted his 
hand against a single life until his hiding-place is 
reached. They chain him to the dungeon floor ; 
they summon the witnesses of the awful deed ; 
they pronounce in solemn voice the sentence of 
death, and do not lose sight of him until the turf 
falls on his dead body. All this is right, because 
the welfare of society demands it. But, alas ! 
when a monster criminal, urged only by personal 
ambition, aims at the political life of the whole 
community ; when he seeks to turn the spirit of 
the age from freedom back to slavery ; when he 
would raze to the ground the temple of our 
national prosperity, whose corner-stones were laid 
in the blood of the earlier Revolution, and every 
granite block in whose walls is a memento of some 
desolated home. Justice uses no harsher phrase than 



ORATION. 19 

when she calls him " the most colossal character 
of the times," and Punishment performs no severer 
duty than when she bids him retire to the banks 
of the St. Lawrence to spend the gold which his 
foresight has supplied. 

Ah ! gentlemen, I am not cruel. I do not like 
to look even upon the merited punishment of a 
bad man. But this I say : There is one man 
too many in America. Yonder, in every State 
south of the Ohio, slumber the brave defenders of 
the flag. The plough of the husbandman grates in 
the soil above their beds ; there is no headstone 
to tell where they sleep ; they are remembered only 
in the sighs of aching liearts throughout the North ; 
their only requiem is the perpetual moaning of the 
wind through the cypress boughs. America, ever 
busy and eager, filled with the hope of the morrow 
more than with the memory of any past, holds 
the great offender, the man who stood at the head 
of the organized rebellion and cheered his soldiers 
to their bloody work, within her fortress walls. 
The people cry out for justice with thunder tones 
that echo from the Pacific shore to the Atlantic 
slope. But policy or cowardice, I know not which, 
finds excuse for delay, and by slow degrees the 
people's cry grows fainter and fainter, until at last 



20 



JULY 4, 1867. 



when the prisoner is released, scarcely a ripple of 
surprise or interest ruffles the surface of the 
nation's daily life. Posterity shall read this terrible 
sentence, written on the bloody page of our time : 
A Republic attaches no penalty to a great crime. 
Only petty guilt is punished ; while colossal crime 
finds an apologist, if not an eulogist, and holds its 
court in Canada. God grant it may not be the 
seed - corn of another rebellion. 

But, in looking at the population of the Southern 
States, and trying to fix their place and value in 
the future of America, we cannot afford to be 
unmindful of the four millions of men and women 
whose history is full of romance, moral courage and 
faith. Claiming our admiration for their unwavering 
loyalty to the flag during the darkest days of the 
war, when their very ignorance seemed illumined 
by the strange light of the dim hope of liberty, as 
their masters' culture was darkened by the gloomy 
frenzy of Slavery, and claiming also our respect 
for the heroic way in which they received the 
divine right to be free, we may safely prophesy 
that they will do us no dishonor in any of the 
trying days to come. The men, whatever their 
color, who could meet together at .midnight, after a 
hard day's labor, in the middle of the swamp, with 



ORATION. 21 

the lash and the bloodhound as the probable 
penalty, and ]3i'^y ^^^ the victorious oncoming of 
an army concerning which they knew nothing 
except through the lying lips of their owners and 
the revealing instincts of their own hearts, are as 
worthy of our confidence, and will become as trusty 
elements of the Republic, as any class or clique in 
the South that has outlived the rebellion. The 
natural allies of Liberty are always those who have 
chafed in their chains. Prejudice aside, I would 
rather trust with the solemn responsibility of a vote 
the rank and file of those heroes who charged at 
Port Hudson, conscious that they Avere marching 
into the Valley of Death, but doing it with the 
courage of Thermopylae, and with the hope to stem 
the tide of Southern falsehood and Northern preju- 
dice, than the most cultured politicians of Richmond, 
who, having the power, have degraded it to personal 
ambition, even though it involve Gettysburg and 
Andersonville. Ignorance and principle are weightier 
than refinement and disloyalty. 

No country presents so sublime a spectacle as ours. 
A whole race is uplifting its hands, and asking for 
the knowledge how to live. Catching a glimpse of 
the glory of the great Republic of which they have 
suddenly become a part, conscious of all the obstacles 



22 JULY 4, 1867. 

which impede their progress towards that education 
which is to mould them into reliable citizens, with a 
past behind them of romantic devotion and unswerving 
loyalty, they only ask that we will protect them by our 
laws in their rights as workmen, as traders, as mer- 
chants, as fathers and as husbands, promising in return 
to stand by our side in all the great political and social 
struggles of the future. It is little enough to ask ; it 
is a small boon to be granted by a noble people. 

And the contrast between them and others to whom 
we grant every political privilege is not so striking as 
we tliink. The great West is full of loyal men who 
have no other education save that they have got on the 
prairies and among their herds. Europe pours her tens 
of thousands every year into the territories beyond the 
Mississippi. Many of them are men who are as inno- 
cent of the use of the pen and the spelling-book as the 
humblest black man ; but they learn enough from the 
atmosphere of the country, and from the thousand acres 
which they till, to join the political army of the 
Republic, and denounce by their votes the recreant 
senator and the disloyal president. They know liberty 
from slavery, not by the distinctions which are made in 
the dictionary, but by the practical differences evident 
in society. You may not call it scholarship, but it is 
wisdom ; it is knowledge acquired by actual experiment ; 



ORATION. 2.j 

and such a man can be trusted more safely than the 
most elegant wire-puller of the land. So with the black 
man who knows not how to spell the word slavery, but 
who has felt its chains and submitted to its lash. He 
knows the Confederate from the Union army to-day as 
well as he did in '63. Listen ! in Atlanta the slave 
owner is speaking. It is a strange sight to see him 
pleading with the men whom he would have driven like 
sheep a few years ago. But to-day he is no more man 
than they ; and, if you measure manhood as you ought, 
not so much. How insinuating is his eloquence ! He 
has boasted that only the man who has lived Avith the 
blacks can talk to them wdth any effect ; that they will 
have more confidence in their former masters than in 
any gentleman from the North ; that they will inevi- 
tably, from the force of habit and the real love they bear 
them, vote for the old overseers. Such a picture of 
patriarchal life is painted, such tender ties of affection 
between the whipper and the whipped are said to exist, 
that we should expect the whole assemblage to vote 
with unanimous force for the dear old master, who 
smiles on his former slaves so benignantly, and so 
politely asks for their influence in the name of the 
svyeet memories of auld lang syne. But poor, ignorant, 
degraded as they are, they are too cunning to be cheated 
by promises, and too clever to be eloquently cajoled out 



24 JULY 4, 18 67. 

of their rights. As the chilling snow-flakes fall, so fall 
his specious words. The audience is unmoved : The 
speaker sees that he is speaking to a whirlwind, and is 
not heeded. He puts his smile from off his lips, fills his 
face with the old look of the master and his mouth with 
insolence and obscenity, and Richard is himself again. 
I tell you, gentlemen, the colored people of the South 
are better citizens of the Republic than the wily orator 
who addresses them thus. 

Let America do them justice, and a great reward 
will be hers. Give them, under proper restrictions, 
the same restrictions which apply to their white 
neighbors, the right to vote, thus rewarding the 
black soldier for his loyalty to the flag, and cloth- 
ing the humblest with a responsibility which will 
rouse his ambition and stir within him a longing 
after education, and you will reap the fruit of 
your justice in a phalanx that will constitute itself 
the wall of your defence in any coming struggle. 
Confiscate enough of the disloyal territory to ensure 
each loyal man his forty acres for a homestead ; 
give him land of his own under his feet, and 
the flag of America over his head, and you have 
nothing to fear. If any voice comes from the 
great sacrifices of six bloody years, it says, Secure 
the safety of the Government beyond a peradven- 



ORATION. 25 

ture, and reward those who have been true, from 
the treasury of those who have been false. The 
sentiment of mankind will defend such a policy of 
severity, and the next generation of black men 
will repay our justice by a million votes for 
Liberty. If we are reckless enough to be unjust, 
we deserve to fall ; if we have the courage to be 
just, we shall live forever. 

I turn now to the brief consideration of the 
second element of our nationality, — the Western. 
No Eastern man can appreciate the vastness and 
the importance of the Great West unless he has 
travelled over its boundless prairies, and looked 
upon the rushing, seething torrent of its commer- 
cial life. One is appalled at the contemplation of 
its immense territory. Single States cover an area 
larger than the whole of New England. Huge 
lines of railroad stretch westward from Chicago 
for more than a thousand miles ; the mines of 
Lake Superior, exhaustless, hold in their earthen 
embrace mineral wealth that startles the world ; 
coal beds underlie the rich soil everywhere, a great 
reservoir of power waiting to be applied to the 
work of civilization ; broad acres, whose agricul- 
tural possibilities defy our power of reckoning, 
stretch far beyond your straining vision ; and above 



26 JULY4,1867. 

all a population restless, ambitious, and in the full 
vigor of early manhood, demand our enthusiastic 
admiration. These characteristics point to a future 
whose magnitude will accord with the miracles 
already achieved. Not always obeying the scrip- 
tural injunction, not to think more highly of them- 
selves than they ought to think ; believing with a 
friendly kind of sincerity, a sincerity that looks 
pityingly on all the inhabitants of the earth who 
do not live in the West, that if there is a pivot 
on which the whole world swings it is somewhere 
within a few hours' ride of Chicago or St. Louis ; 
they yet do exhibit a vigor, a commercial hero- 
ism, a willingness to undertake new and great 
projects which no other part of this country 
presents. 

In the war they discovered theii' political policy, 
to save the whole country, and to make and keep 
the whole a free country. Their brave boys are 
under the sod of every battle-field ; their brave 
women, true Spartans, tilled the soil, drove the 
herds, reaped the harvests, sold the produce, in- 
vested the capital, and made us proud to believe 
that in America, when the great emergency comes, 
our women claim the right to do our work, some- 
times with hearts aching towards the field of strife, 



ORATION. 27 

while we are dressing into line, or fighting for the 
grand future. 

The political importance of the West cannot be 
overstated. It already wields a large part of the 
republican power of the country, and it will not be 
many years before we shall look to the millions 
near the Mississippi to crystallize into laws the hopes 
and aspirations which freighted the Mayflower. 
The South has as yet shown no political charac- 
teristics. There is no party there whose principles 
can be reckoned as forces for the future. The 
ideas of the people are chaotic. We believe that 
by the introduction of Northern educational institu- 
tions they will sometime grow into that radical 
love of liberty which is to be the bulwark of the 
nation ; but to-day we are not sure of their future. 
The States that lie between the James River, the 
Hudson River and the great Illinois prairies are 
full of political theories unsound and unsafe. Too 
timid to confirm by law whatever is right in 
morals, too much bound by commercial interests to 
be radical in their thinking and voting, loaded 
down with the debris of that kind of democracy 
which thought twice before it struck a blow for 
the tottering government, it will for a long while 
stand neutral in the great political contests that are 



28 JULY4,1867. 

coming. But the Far West, with its large farms 
and its large-hearted men and women, its immense 
number of Germans and Scandinavians, who bring 
with them to their homes the fresh, beautiful love 
of liberty which compelled them to leave the old 
world, if we can only plant in its midst the school- 
houses and churches, the lyceums and the presses 
M'hich have been the moulding influences of the 
East, can always be relied upon to stand firm for 
that justice between man and man, and for those 
rights and privileges which enable the poorest born 
to reach and hold the highest office within the 
people's gift. Nothing is more evident than this, 
that New England and the West will write the 
next page of American history. 

I believe this, because the West is growing more 
rapidly than any other part of the country. The 
tens of thousands who emigrate from the poverty 
of the old to the hopes of the new world, anxious 
to build a home at once, naturally gravitate to 
that vast territory which belongs to any one who 
can level the forest and till the soil. They are a 
hardy class of men and women. Full of health 
and vigor and ambition, they somehow get into the 
spirit of the age at once, and so, by means of 
the ploughs, rakes, reaping and threshing machines, 



ORATION. 29 

conceived by the genius and made by the skill of 
Eastern men, they are marching along the high- 
way of industry to social position, patriotism and 
wealth. What a transformation from their sur- 
roundings in Europe ! There they were only serfs, 
crushed into sloth or indifference by the leaden 
weight of a public opinion that frowned upon all 
attempts to rise. They walked along the narrow 
path which had been trodden by their fathers, and 
their children had no higher hope than they. The 
mere drudges of society, they chafed against the 
chains that held them, and at last found liberty and 
hope for themselves and their little ones in the 
midst of the great prairies of the West. 

So in a few years the log huts on the river's 
bank have disappeared and the thrifty, busy town 
builds its school-houses and its churches to attest 
its earnest and its hopeful work. The little village 
on the edge of the lake through which a quarter 
of a century ago a loaded team could scarcely find 
a safe passage, has become a huge and command- 
ing city, claiming the admiration of the world, and 
built, not like St. Petersburg, by the command of 
an imperious and obstinate king, but by the royal 
will and generosity of a free and ambitious people. 

If with this immense commercial vigor which 



30 JULY 4, 1867. 

attracts the young men of the whole country there 
shall be interwoven the true spirit of republican 
society and government ; if a true railicalism in 
politics, the radicalism which knows no local issues, 
which recognizes no geographical lines, but loves 
the whole country from ocean to ocean and from 
Gulf to Lakes, shall keep pace with this magnifi- 
cent and rapid progress ; and if, above all, a spirit 
of justice, morality and pure religion shall crown 
the increasing power of the glorious West ; if she 
will only hew the corner-stones of her temples of 
religion, art and commerce out of our own Ply- 
mouth Rock, we will not envy her her greatness, 
but give her, and the tens of thousands of our 
New -England boys who are her sinew and her 
strength, our hearty God-speed, proud to believe 
that when a dozen generations shall have passed 
away, and her ten millions have become an hun- 
di-ed, the dear old flag, hallowed by the sacred 
memories of two great struggles, will stand for the 
same liberty and the same republican justice be- 
tween all classes of which it is the type to-day. 
Brethren of the West, we strike palms with you. 
New England greets you on this anniversary. We 
see the glory that awaits you. We believe that 
the tide of humanity, that has already swept five 



ORATION. 31 

hundred miles beyond the Father of Waters, will 
keep its onAvard course until it grazes its herds on 
the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. We can al- 
ready hear the wind vibrating the Eolian wire that 
flashes our smiles and tears, our hopes and fears, 
to the Pacific shore ; and we can almost hear the 
rattling of the train that starts from a Boston de- 
pot, that winds through eastern farms, and that 
strings all the great cities of the North upon the 
same line of light and love, waking the echoes in 
the city by the Golden Gate. Let us always 
stand together, and in our greatness let us never 
forget that that government alone is lasting that 
knows the right and has the moral courage to 
brand all traitors with infamy, and defend all man- 
hood in every class and of every color. 

And now, gentlemen, what shall I say — what 
can I say — of the New-England element of our 
American nationality? It is always with pride that 
we contemplate the character of that influence which 
comes from our educational institutions and our 
political principles, and which is doing so much to 
temper and give tone to the public opinion of the 
whole country. Surely, it is not merely in a 
boastful mood that we look on the long and glorious 
vista behind us, and feel every nerve tingle in glad 



32 JULY 4, 18G7. 

thanksgiving that we are the sons of noble sires. 
The grandeur of New England lies in the fact, that 
in every political and military struggle, the end has 
been the advocacy of some higher political principle, 
or the demand for a larger charity and a wider 
freedom. New England, in the history of the 
nineteenth century, with her common schools in 
every street, in every village and hamlet — with 
her thousand presses that scatter the daily news 
over every hill and valley ; with her white 
spires rising from every spot where an hundred 
sturdy farmers build their huts — stands as the 
type of the foremost thought and hope of 
human progress. She began her career when the 
Mayflower cast anchor, freighted with that precious 
heroism which the Old World could ill spare, but 
which laid the corner-stone of the New World in 
ecclesiastical freedom. She was true to her birth- 
right when she dared to spill a brother's blood on 
the field of Lexington, crying out with Roman 
courage : Not that I love England less, but that I 
love freedom more. She was not unworthy of her 
ancestry when in the last struggle she lifted up her 
voice before the smoke of the first battle had 
rolled away, demanding, in the name of the national 
sacrifice about to be placed upon the bloody altar 



ORATION. 33 

of war, universal liberty and the civil rights of all 
classes. And to-day, as in no other part of the 
country, radical thought, that seeks to destroy our 
prejudices, social and political, that advocates the 
plain rights of man or woman, finds in our midst 
a welcome and a hearing. It is our boast and 
pride that we fear nothing except ignorance and 
caste. We have built our power out of a knowl- 
edge how to read and think ; we believe in nothing 
so much as in the school-book ; we have no hope 
for the future except that which comes from the 
school-house ; we place the most implicit trust in an 
educated public opinion, and we believe that a man's 
title to nobility should be sought for in his brain and 
heart, and not in the color of his skin. 

That public opinion is our bulwark and our 
strength. It is not swayed by passion; it is not 
carried too far by a popular favorite. It looked 
with unmixed admiration upon Sherman as he swept 
like a tornado from the mountains to the sea, 
tearing up secession by the roots ; but when the 
hero, for a moment only, doffed his purple and put 
on the cap and bells, it stood still in mute aston- 
ishment and regret, and not a single shout was 
heard for one who could have the whole of our 
love while he was just, but who was met by the 

5 



34 JULY 4; 18 07. 

people's frown the very moment he stepped beyond 
the general into the politician. 

A Parisian crowd follows its leader anywhere. 
It has no aim, no policy, no goal. Admiring only 
the brilliancy of heroic deeds, it is often led by 
this will-o'-the-wisp into anarchy and chaos. The 
New England people admire and applaud only the 
man who represents them, who is doing brave 
work for them and for their children, and whose 
heroism results in larger rights. And so we have 
idealized the man who was our President, not 
because he was ^ a president, but because he was 
an honest man. As the ancient Greeks lifted 
their mighty heroes into demi-gods, and soon 
forgot that they had ever been human, with 
sharp idiosyncrasies and unpleasant peculiarities, 
so have the American people lifted up their 
martyr-chief, Abraham Lincoln, so high that 
we shall never again see his awkwardness, his 
coarseness, but only his truthfulness, his moral 
courage, his calm sagacity, and his fidelity to the 
great purpose of the blood-stained hour. And, in 
like fashion, we turn away in sadness, if not in 
indignation, from that man, whether he be Presi- 
dent, Secretary of State, or Attorney-General, who 
tampers with the plain rights of the loyal, and 



ORATION. 35 

coquets with what is disloyal. We respect no one 
except the man who is in the right, and who 
shows it by throwing his political influence into the 
same scale that holds the memory of half a million 
dead or maimed soldiers. Your education, your 
history, culminates at that point. It is your divine 
right, it is a duty you owe to the past, to the 
present and to the great future, to turn aside from 
him, from them, from all, whatever badge of office 
they wear, who are recreant to the people's will. 

And so, to-day, looking on the struggle between 
the Executive on the one hand, honest or dishonest, 
who has forgiven the arch-traitor, who will hang 
his meanest subordinate when the disgusting details 
have all been told, who vetoed the Military Bill 
because it gave unlimited and despotic power into 
the hands of subordinate officials, and who now 
removes those officials on the ground that they have 
no power whatever exce]3t to disperse mobs and 
quell disturbances, who does not, and who does not 
intend to accord with the will of the glorious dead, 
or the Avill of the living who gave their all for 
Liberty; and on the other hand, a simple Major- 
General who does not know how to pull the wires 
of political preferment, who knows only his plain 
and simple duty, to remove all rebels from office. 



36 JULY 4, 18 07. 

and to put in their places loyal and trustworthy 
men, and who does that duty with a singleness of 
purpose and a moral courage that stamps him a 
true hero in every fibre, I say, in that great strug- 
gle, the people care absolutely nothing for the 
prestige of the sceptre which the one man wields, 
and do not regard the weakness of the other ; but, 
looking only at the righteousness of the cause, cry 
out with one voice, and that a voice of thunder, 
Mr. President, you are wrong, and you must yield, 
and General Sheridan, hero of a hundred fights, 
you are right, and we will sustain you. 

New England has always held her place in the van of 
the great array of progress. While rebellion was being 
organized, and all through its short, convulsive life, it 
bestowed its heartiest anathemas upon us ; but now 
that rebellion is dead, the people of the South are 
beginning to feel that the most permanent reconstruc- 
tion demands the adoption of the self- same radical 
thoughts and principles which grew and flourished only 
on New-England soil. That love of liberty which has 
been cherished among our hills for two generations, 
which the South has vainly combated both on the 
floors of Congress by word and bludgeon, and on the 
battle-field by sword and starvation, has at last become 
the corner-stone of the new edifice, and not only the 



ORATION. 37 

common people but even the generals of the disbanded 
army are uniting their efforts to lift it into place. It 
cannot be many months before the lines of caste, and 
the prejudice of color will give vray to the oncoming 
civilization, and South Carolina and Massachusetts, 
united in the beginning in defence of a common 
cause, separated for three generations by the most 
implacable differences of policy and administration, 
shall strike palms again to carry on the same cause 
which gave us the heroism of the last century. And 
gentlemen, we can to-day remember with becoming 
pride that from the first hour when the old bell in 
Independence Hall sent its ominous but glorious 
echoes along our granite hills to this very moment, 
the course of New England has been single and 
consistent. Liberty and justice was the cry which 
then woke the patriotism of our fathers ; liberty 
and justice called their sons to arms in 1860, and 
the love of liberty and justice constitute the grandeur 
of New-England manhood and womanhood to-day. 
Our course has been straight on. Other States, 
moved by a different policy, made a long and sad 
detour from the highway of true republicanism, 
trusting to the fallacies of State rights, slavery and 
caste, and after wandering for ninety years, insisting 
all the while that their path was the only road to 



38 JULY 4, 18G7. 

national strength and glory, growing weaker every 
day, and every day more indolent and reckless, an- 
swering all questions with the knife or the pistol, 
they have at last laid the whole pile of slavery's 
chains aside, and come back to our path to confess that 
there can be no permanent greatness and no enduring 
strength except under the principles which have 
always been the crown and glory of New England. 
Ah, gentlemen, it is no common victory which 
we have won ! It is nothing less than the triumph 
of free speech, free thought throughout the conti- 
nent, the adoption everywhere in America of those 
truths that have always been so dear to us. Here- 
after the flag shall mean more than ever. The 
stain has been washed out in tears and blood ; a 
new era has begun ; the gray streaks of another 
and a better political day are breaking through 
the clouds ; slavery is dead, freedom has been 
crystallized into law ; justice has become a possi- 
bility, and the ark of our national covenant, held 
up in the arms of the largest-hearted heroism 
and patriotism the world has yet seen, has been 
carried safely through the sea of blood, and placed 
in security upon the eternal rock of a tri- 
umphant republicanism. 

Fellow-citizens, I congratulate you upon the 



O RATION. 39 

achievements of the past, and the transcendent 
hopes of the future. Let us look forward to the 
hour, not distant, when all the people of this 
country shall be bound more closely than ever 
before by a common interest and purpose. Our 
brethren of the South, redeemed from the fatal 
error of three generations, shnll till the rich soil 
with free hands, and confess that labor urged by 
the whip can never compete with that earnest and 
ambitious toil which always marks the freeman. 
Our brethren of the West, hardy, sturdy, brave and 
true, shall educate the millions who find a home in 
the great prairies, and develop the marvellous resour- 
ces of a region richer than our thought or hope, 
and New England, God grant it, shall keep her 
place at the head of every progressive and reforma- 
tory movement. Then we shall be one people from 
the shores washed by the Atlantic, to the western 
slope where the mild Pacific sings its lullaby to the 
setting sun ; and from the lakes of the North to 
the warm gulf of the South, while over us shall wave 
the flag that means Liberty and Justice for all. 



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